The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  “No’m.”

  There. There it was: the requisite undressing. Her words had made them disrobe. They had taken off their arrogance and let it fall to the ground before them. She had done it without the use of the whip, which illustrated, for her, the difference between women and men. Men were bluster, endless, preening bluster that needed, more than anything in the world, encouragement through audience. For men, privacy was the most frightening thing in the world because what was the point of doing anything that couldn’t be revered? What difference did it make to stand on a pedestal when there was no one there to look up?

  Women, most women, did it differently. Privacy allowed them the power to be cruel but regarded as kind, to be strong and be thought delicate. It was crucial, though, that she be alone in this, for men were liable, even in these spaces, to snatch from her these tiny moments of a more balanced nature in bloom. Men, it seemed, were built for the sake of catastrophe and were determined to be who they were built to be.

  But Isaiah and Samuel, they were an anomaly. In this place—she had still not received an adequate answer to explain why it felt like that to be there—they had understood the necessity for privacy and the dangers of audience. Though maybe they didn’t understand enough, judging from their shared welts. Perhaps they wore those outside to alleviate the ones inside. Finally, a subject she understood in the reality of this other place. She walked in the space between them and stood there facing the light so that her gown obscured their view of each other. All they could possibly see was the suggestion of each other, the roundness of head and perhaps the broadness of shoulder, through the filter that draped her body.

  “This is another place, ain’t it? Here is somewhere different. I can’t be the only one who knows it, am I?”

  “Missy?” Isaiah asked.

  “I don’t want to hear you talk no more. I want to hear this one speak,” she said, looking directly at Samuel, whose neck was bent forward and head bent down, mouth ajar.

  Ruth followed the outline of his curves: over his head, around his shoulders, along his arms, to the bend of his legs and the bottom of his rough-hewn feet. He was blessèd. The night wore him well, so well that she would have no need for the other one, the one with the more cheerful eyes, even under these circumstances, that she could feel even though they never looked at her directly. It was easy for her to picture herself wearing Samuel closely, like a shawl or beaded necklace, something simple to drape for a cold occasion or a festive one, only to remove when the sun returned to the sky or it was time to rest.

  She touched Samuel and he stiffened, nearly recoiled, but that didn’t stop her from running her fingers down his back, following the path of welts, thick and thin. In her mind, she played images of what this must be like for Paul. Did he, too, touch the niggers he took before he took them? Were his eyes open? Did he hold his breath? There were enough of them now—bright-faced niggers marked in Halifax tones—for her to raise up from her deep denial about how her savior could allow himself to stoop so low. The only reprieve was in knowing that these sins were merely transactional and so weren’t sins after all. If God could forgive, then she must also.

  She looked down at the crown of Samuel’s head. “Lie back,” she whispered, and yet he didn’t weep.

  Pitiful. Just pitiful, which is how she preferred it. That way, she maintained her sense of control. This one was big, but he was prostrate, as he belonged. As rough as it was, the kink and coil of his hair posed no threat in this state of supplication. She wound herself around him because time was the one thing that wasn’t on her side. Timothy would be home soon, stalking the grounds for a subject to paint. James might be patrolling with a few of his men, who she reckoned were only a step above nigger status themselves. Paul could be anywhere. She couldn’t be seen this way, as she was, unencumbered by corset or hand in marriage, keen to let her breasts sag and not be pushed up until they threatened to constrict her lungs. No, all that did was heighten her anger and everything—every single thing—that had a source eventually returned to it. But in the meantime, in between time, it had to be let loose.

  She lifted her gown to her knees, pulled it out from her legs to act as a shield between her and the why-isn’t-he-weeping? nigger supine at her feet. The other one dared to raise his head even if he didn’t look directly at her. She couldn’t tell the difference between envy and pity, so she didn’t know what to make of the look on his face.

  “Look away,” she commanded.

  Slowly, Isaiah turned his head to the horse pens. She looked that way too. Two horses, one brown, one white with brown splotches, poked their heads forward as if they were curious, wanted to see—as if they hadn’t seen enough already. But what would they hold on to? Would they remember this and, in a fit of solidarity, as beasts of burden are known for sometimes sticking together, pull her carriage off the road into some ravine, watching her tumble and break bones, and for what—a memory no creature had a right to let linger?

  To hell with it all; she looked away. She fumbled first, reaching her hand down to undo Samuel’s pants and then squatted down onto the lap of the thing beneath her. She threw her head back for no reason. There was no joy. There was no exaltation. Underneath her, there was no mountainous terrain, only plateaus, which would have been offensive to anyone who expected at least hands raised in worship.

  “Are you broken?”

  She didn’t even look at him when she asked because no answer could smooth the offense. She cussed herself just a bit for thinking she could succeed where only failure had been spoken. Above her head, she thought she heard the roof creak, as though the weight of this place was finally too much. Should the whole thing cave in, pulling in the barn, the animals, the trees, the ground, and the sky itself, how uncomely it would be for them to find her remains sharing the same space as these unbaptized barn hands. What was she doing there? they would ask, knowing full well what she was doing, but because speaking ill of the dead is an affront to Christ, who rose Himself up just to make that message clear, and who will, at some unknown point, return just to confirm it, they would cry and bless her name, and the truth would be buried with her.

  Ruth became aware of her weight on top of Samuel. And the weight of Isaiah’s eyes. And the weight of all the children who never had the chance to be. And across her back, she felt the measure of Paul’s palm, how he steadied her when she shook, and how that must have been the influence of his mother, Elizabeth, whose name was given to the land, and she felt grateful for what he could remember of his mother that helped him retain a piece of kindness reserved especially for Ruth.

  She covered her head, but the roof didn’t fall in on her. The creak she thought she heard was nothing more than the whimper of the nigger who was looking away at her command. There she was in the middle of a mess and couldn’t remember how it had come to be. She recalled the glow and before that, the flowers and the soil. She concluded that this was a place that played tricks on the mind. Oh, and the weight. Clearly, the pressure had become just too much, and it made her dizzy. The only cure was to return to where the air made sense.

  “Get off me!” she shouted before she stood up, suddenly, letting her gown’s edge drop back down to her ankles. She was standing, but she didn’t move any farther. She once again became transfixed by the lamplight, which flickered but wouldn’t extinguish. The light itself, she noticed, had a dark spot at its core. “That,” she said to herself, “that is where we are!” But how, she wondered. How could just moving from one side of the fence to the other transport her from light to no-light? She stumbled over to the lamp and kicked it over. It didn’t ignite the hay and threaten to engulf the entire barn in flames. It simply went out.

  Now in a dark room, with only the occasional grunts of animals, the labored breathing of the whining nigger, and the pointy silence of the forced-quiet one to remind her that she was still where she was, she looked up. She hadn’t noticed it before when
she thought the roof was collapsing onto her head. There was a rectangular opening that let the sky in and she saw, in that little opening, the sky that had become so familiar to her. It was peppered with tiny white stars, the only audience she felt it harmless to stand before, shining down on her at a safe distance, giving her the direction she had been asking for the entire time, but that no one was able to give her.

  She walked in a circle. She raised her hands. She laughed. That last piece was a knowing. She knew she had access to things no one else had ever seen before. They would think her mad, but she knew better. She knew that there was a long line of women, from every side of the sea, who survived long enough so she could be here in this moment. And more than survived; they wanted to see to it that she wouldn’t be condemned to the lives they had little choice but to lead. Each of them, now dots in an inky sky, guiding her away from witch hunts and burnings, from rapes and conjugal beds, the chastity and modesty designed by men to be foisted upon the backs and fronts of women, but only for the leisure, pleasure, and whims of men. Hosanna!

  That was why she lost the children! It came to her in just that very moment. Not as punishment, but as liberation. What this meant was that Timothy, her Timothy, whom she had thanked God for, was either a help, and so was allowed to pass through, or a harm, and her misguided but well-intentioned prayers had undone centuries of careful planning because she failed to recognize a blessing when it was trying to be bestowed upon her. So then maybe his journey to the North was for good. Maybe it was to set right a grievous wrong, a spell to undo the folly of putting a throned man above a cascade of women who went down screaming so she wouldn’t have to.

  Now that there was no further need for the circle, she stopped. She felt dizzy. She moved away from whiny-whiny and stepped over the sharp silence. On her way back to the entrance, the life she left behind was in view, just a sliver between the crack of doors, but it was where she knew she had a better chance of belonging and she rushed toward it. She pulled open the doors and the heaviness was there. She sprinted quickly, her gown in her way, but it didn’t slow her down. She climbed the gate this time, wanting to go over something rather than under it, but it never occurred to her to use the entrance because that was unnecessary if there was no one there to open it for her and close it behind her.

  The garden had called her name, but she didn’t have the time now. She would see it again in the daylight. She, Maggie, and Essie would come with the gift of water, the sweet kind from the well. No, it wasn’t a waste to use that in the garden. Water was abundant and always would be. Besides, it welcomed the congress, for look what it produced.

  She dashed into the Big House, up the stairs, and burst into her room. It was hot and it smelled like her, which is to say that it smelled like lavender and dirt and the two together she didn’t mind. She took off her nightgown and let it fall to the floor. Watching it crumpled there reminded her that she had just been rejected. How did that escape her before? The silence and the weeping, and also the heaviness and the glowing, had managed to distract her and given her too much to contemplate to even consider taking what had always been hers to begin with. Still, there was something she could extract from this to fill her belly. All she had to say was a word.

  She looked down at her feet. They weren’t dirty—not on the tops and not on the soles. That was impossible because she had gone from garden, to weeds, to horse shit, to dust and hay, and back again. Yet, her feet were as clean as if she had just soaked and bathed. Perhaps it was true then: she could float. Like some pure angel, a kind of feather, or her starry sisters, she could free herself from the confines of the ground itself, call out her own name, and be lifted, just a little, up to a more suitable air.

  She went over to her dresser and took another gown from it. She put it on and it was weightless. She smiled uncontrollably. When she finally lay down to return to rest, it felt different. It felt like lying down in sky.

  It felt like flying.

  Babel

  At dawn, the trees of Empty were as ferocious as they were during the shade of night. Looming and towering, stationed at the borders, beckoning high above the fog, but only in the interest of luring close enough to kill. Kill whom? It depends. But lately one kind in particular. These trees are no home, not to the sparrow or the blue jay, nor to the ant or caterpillar. These trees, some upright, some gnarled, some felled, all sentinels, tasked with one bit of labor: to witness. And maybe they do, but what use is a witness who would never offer up testimony?

  But, oh yes. The testimony is there, to be pried from them only. The streaks on their bodies, the gashes revealing the white meat beneath, the cracked branches snapped holding the weight. There are reasons for every split, but they never tell, not even when asked. You must know, therefore, how to prod, where to seek. Peering into the cuts that lead to the roots: roots that lead to soil: soil that doesn’t lie, but curls beneath the toes of those whose blood nourishes it, who in other lands was skin-family, just like the cosmos above. One day someone will tell the story, but never today.

  These trees, they guarded the edges. The most crucifying places were at the edges, there where the plantation met the land that had no owners (so said the people who were killed for challenging the idea that the dirt could have an owner). These were the roads, hot from the Mississippi sun, but not dry because the air was too thick, where even horses walked more freely than the people, insects hovering in the sovereignty they took wholly for granted, and the outer woods, the rivers rushing forward to who knows where, the arc of skies, low but forever out of reach. All these things never to be touched by any of them without great cost: a loss of limbs or a separation of spirit from body, the latter being the most preferable, but cowards would never understand that because liberty is more bitter than sweet.

  And what of the homeless birds? They fly over in judgment. Almost all of them: the sparrow and the blue jay, and also the dove and the robin, but the raven is nowhere to be found. And the crashing of their voices would singe if the ones at whom they were cackling weren’t already burned by summer. So for the incinerated, the robin in particular was only music.

  And there was, too, another rhythm beneath, a quiet pulse, one that had started even before the march out to the ends of Empty. Isaiah and Samuel thought they were the only ones who could hear it. Blithely, it whistled not so much in the wind as in the swaying of hands and hips, like in the midday praise in the clearing where they weren’t welcome unless . . . But the sound traveled and reached some ears whether they wanted to hear or not. It wasn’t, in fact, the people singing as they had first thought. It was someone else, or more than someone, judging from the harmonies. It sounded like something old and comforting, which made Samuel feel silly and Isaiah act it.

  Ruth had to say but one word, and James, who had to act even if he didn’t believe, rounded up his barely-men to shake Isaiah and Samuel out of slumber—even before The Two of Them had a chance to rise and shine into each other’s faces, sweep up the hay they had fashioned into a bed, and greet morning with the same trepidation they would for the rest of their lives. How quickly and forcefully they snatched Samuel and Isaiah up and ordered them to stand. And the gleeful yet rough-hewn manner with which they fastened the shackles to their wrists and ankles. And then the spikes.

  By the time they had been pushed out of the barn, the animals more surprised than they were, horses flexing their front legs and pigs’ squeals drawn out, Isaiah and Samuel had seen what the fog couldn’t hide. They expected the crowd that had already gathered, golden in the torchlight of the dawn. Some were tired. Some were smiling. The latter stunned Isaiah, but not Samuel. These were people after all. There was, therefore, some kind of happiness to be found in someone else being humiliated for once. Failure of memory prevented the empathy that should have been natural. Samuel knew, though, that it was selective memory, the kind that was cultivated here among the forget-me-nots.

  The morning mist
would soon give way. It would no longer crown their heads and obstruct beauty from view. Soon, it would descend and bless their knees and then their ankles before disappearing into the ground itself, revealing, then, how even a horrible place like this could be winsome. Ask the dragonflies.

  How many people had already died on this land and who were they? First the Yazoo, who fought valiantly, surely, but who could never have been prepared for guns, or disease molded into the shape of one. Surely, the Choctaw were next.

  And then the kidnapped people, the ones who dropped dead from toil, yes, but especially the ones who refused to mule, whose very skin was defiance. They were the ones who looked on from the darkness and occasionally whispered to their children, How could you? Samuel thought they meant: How could you let them? Isaiah thought, How could you stay? Answers weren’t forthcoming and righteousness filled the voids.

  Samuel raised his head first. He figured that if pain was going to be this day, it might as well be earned. One of the barely-men snatched the chain attached to the shackle around his neck, pulling him backward. But he didn’t fall. The three of them moved directly behind him, attaching his chains, and therefore Isaiah’s chains, to the wagon that James had already climbed into. An old rickety thing—the wagon yes, but James too—in desperate need of repair: wobbly and dented wheels that made the ride bumpy and unsure, but purposely made pulling it more of a chore; a bed so eaten through by who knew what that the ground beneath could be seen through it, making it a dangerous ride for passengers as well. But it had long stopped serving the purpose of lessening burdens.

  James raised his right hand and one by one some of the people moved from one misty spot to the other. Isaiah had stopped counting the number of them told to cram themselves onto the flat and focused instead on the distance between him, Samuel, and them. Some of them rushed onto it, but Isaiah couldn’t exactly tell whose speed was cursed by excitement and whose was blessed by fear. As they stood in the vehicle that threatened to collapse under their weight, none of that mattered. What mattered was the elevation. Holding on to knowledge that the toubab didn’t have yet, they could now look down, and that, too, was irresistible. Even that tiny bit of height brought about a new perspective that straightened backs and raised chins, while arms met hips akimbo. Isaiah accepted this foolishness, for he knew the source was false. But it stuck in Samuel’s throat like a bluegill bone and wouldn’t dislodge.